Performance Prediction and Optimization of Flying Base Station During Emergency Scenarios

In emergency scenarios, such as natural disasters, communications infrastructure might be unavailable due to partial or complete damage. As such, efficient and prompt alternative should be ready to replace the damaged communications infrastructure. To this end, due to the recent technological advances in Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), the concept of flying Base Station (BS) has been introduced to provide the necessary wireless connectivity for disaster areas. A flying BS is a normal BS carried by a UAV, which enables optimizing its location and height to attain the desired performance. In this paper, we examine the performance of a flying BS equipped by 4 × 4 transmit antenna array and operating on 28GHz over the main campus of Hamad Medical Corporation and Souq Waqif in Doha, Qatar. Simulations, carried out using Wireless InSite, include analyzing the average received power at sets of receivers regularly distributed through out the considered area. Analysis are conducted considering different locations, different transmitter altitudes, different receive antenna types and different spacing distances of receiver sets. Results reveal that transmitter height at the considered locations has a slight impact in case of omnidirectional receive antennas, while increasing the height has a negative impact on the average received power in case of directional receive antennas.